Walk into Piedmont Park through the Exedra at Highland and Magnolia on the last Sunday of September and you will pass a scarecrow before you pass a person. This year's theme along Scarecrow Alley is "Under the Sea," so the straw figures wear fins instead of flannel, and they will stay propped up around town for weeks after the festival ends, visible on ordinary morning walks well into October. That detail alone tells you something has shifted. Piedmont has run its Harvest Festival for 27 years before this one. What's new is everything happening around it.
This is the 28th Harvest Festival, set for Sunday, September 27, from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. But the festival itself is no longer the whole story. Nine days earlier, on September 18, the city's new Food Truck Friday series returns to the park at 5 p.m. The next day, September 19, kids are building cardboard boats at the Community Pool for a race that did not exist a year ago. On the 25th, Piedmont Cub Scouts sponsor a screening of "Elio" in the park at 7:15 p.m. Then the festival lands two days after that. Four events, none of them redundant, all within walking distance of each other, packed into a little over a week.
If you've lived here a while, that density is the actual story. Piedmont's public calendar used to have a lot more air in it.
A pool that took six years to reopen just found its first fall rhythm
The reason this fall reads differently starts with the pool, not the festival.
Piedmont's old community pool closed in 2020, not because anyone wanted it to, but because the pandemic forced the city's hand on a facility that was already failing. City officials had been told as far back as 2018 that keeping the aging pool alive would require more than $1.5 million in near-term renovations. By June 2020, the estimate for keeping it merely "marginally functional" over the next decade had climbed past $4 million, with operating shortfalls treated as close to certain. The old pool had also been quietly leaking between 3,000 and 3,700 gallons of water a day. In September 2021, the city drained it for good and began demolition.
What followed was a five-year build. Construction substantially wrapped in September 2025, but commissioning problems, including equipment issues that surfaced that December, kept pushing the opening back. A temporary certificate of occupancy finally came through on February 6, 2026. Mayor Betsy Smegal Andersen cut the ribbon on April 11, and the new Community Pool, an all-electric facility with a 12-lane competition pool and a separate zero-depth activity pool, opened to the public at a discounted five-dollar-per-visit rate through the end of the month.
That is the context worth holding onto: this pool is brand new to Piedmont as an institution, not just as a building. It has never had a fall before. And instead of easing into one, the Recreation Department built two new signature events directly into its first autumn: the Cardboard Boat Build & Race on September 19 and a Pumpkin Dive on October 24. Both are listed on the city's pool schedule with the note "details to come," which is normal for a program still finding its footing, but the placement is not incidental. September 19 sits six days before the Cub Scout movie night and eight days before the Harvest Festival. The city did not scatter the pool's debut events across the calendar. It clustered them right where residents were already going to be.
The same nine days, mapped
Here is what that stretch actually looks like if you're planning a family's September around it.
| Date | Event | Where |
|---|---|---|
| Fri, Sept 18 | Food Truck Friday, 5 p.m. | Piedmont Park |
| Sat, Sept 19 | Cardboard Boat Build & Race | Piedmont Community Pool |
| Fri, Sept 25 | Movie in the Park, "Elio," 7:15 p.m., sponsored by Piedmont Cub Scouts | Piedmont Park |
| Sun, Sept 27 | 28th Harvest Festival, 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. | Piedmont Park |
| Fri, Oct 16 | Food Truck Friday, 5 p.m. | Piedmont Park |
| Sat, Oct 24 | Pumpkin Dive | Piedmont Community Pool |
Food Truck Friday itself is new as a standing series this year, not a one-off. The Recreation Department added it over the summer and, after residents pushed back on an earlier evening slot as too late for young kids, moved the start time to 5 p.m. The series already kicked off on August 21 and has two dates left on the books, September 18 and October 16. That is a small operational change, but it tells you the city is treating this as a recurring habit for families rather than a special occasion.
Three entrances, one bigger festival
The Harvest Festival itself has grown enough that it now uses the park's full geography rather than one central lawn. Piedmont Park covers roughly 15 acres, and the festival spreads across all three of its entrances: the east side at 711 Highland Avenue where the Community Hall sits, the Wildwood Avenue side that looks out over Witter Field toward the Bay and Mount Tamalpais, and the formal Exedra entryway at Highland and Magnolia, marked by its blue ceramic vase. The Farmers Market and food trucks cluster near the Community Hall. The Art Show settles near the Tea House. Scarecrow Alley threads the paths connecting them.
The Farmers Market portion is bigger this year too, anchored by Village Market, the festival's longstanding produce vendor, now joined by stalls selling vegetable starts, flowers, local honey, and small-batch desserts. Line 51 Brewing, the Oakland brewery that joined as a 2024 addition, is back with its beer bus. If you're bringing kids, the practical move is buying carnival wristbands ahead of time at PiedmontStore.org. They cover unlimited carnival games, one pass through the Cake Hop, and a snow cone, and the proceeds go directly to the town's three elementary schools, Beach, Havens, and Wildwood. Buying online also means skipping the line that forms on site.
If you only have the Sunday, a workable route is entering through the Exedra to let kids see the tot lot's new swings first, then working toward the Farmers Market and the cider press, then circling back for the watermelon eating contest at 1 p.m., with the jazz stage already running since 11. The Edibles Contest tends to get overlooked next to the carnival and the beer bus, but it's worth a stop if you're curious what your neighbors have been baking.
What this actually means if you live here
None of this is really about a festival getting a fresh coat of paint. It's about a city of roughly 11,000 people rebuilding a piece of shared infrastructure and then, almost immediately, wiring it into the calendar events residents already treat as anchors. A pool that spent six years as a drained shell and a line item in council minutes is now the site of a kids' boat race that lands eight days before the town's oldest tradition. That is not how civic calendars usually work. Usually a new facility takes a year or two to earn a place next to the traditions that already have decades of muscle memory behind them. Piedmont skipped that lag.
If you're the kind of resident who plans August around back to school and treats late September as a quiet stretch before Halloween decorating starts, this is the year to recheck that assumption. The park and the pool are close enough to each other that a single Saturday, September 19, could reasonably include a cardboard boat launching at the pool in the morning and a walk through the Exedra to see how the scarecrows are coming together in the afternoon.
Homes by Karthiga tracks these shifts in Piedmont because they say something real about how the town is investing in its own daily life, not just its housing stock. If you're thinking about what a home in Piedmont actually means day to day, not just what it costs, Homes by Karthiga can walk you through it. Get your personalized market strategy whenever you're ready to talk specifics.
